Bo Bergman’s “Shut down the Internet” letter goes viral in Sweden

A 73-year-old Swedish man has become an unlikely Internet celebrity due to a letter he wrote to a newspaper demanding officials “shut down the Internet.”

Bo Bergman of Simlangsdalen gained fame when a letter he sent to the Hallands-Posten newspaper — demanding an end to civilian use of the Internet — went viral online, TheLocal.se reported Tuesday.

“My proposal: Shut down the Internet! You can’t, it’s gone on for too long, you’ll all surely answer. No!” he wrote. “Return the internet to the military department … before everything crumbles. Destroy it while it’s there.”

Johan Hammerby, who is in charge of the letters sent to the newspaper, said the letter has been viewed more than 30,000 times on the newspaper’s website, making it one of the site’s most popular items of all time.

“It’s been shared on Facebook and retweeted so much,” Hammerby told The Local. “Readers seem to think he’s just a funny old man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. They point out that he doesn’t have any good argument, but they love the way he writes.

“The funniest thing is that he’s an Internet celebrity and he doesn’t even know it,” Hammerby said.

Bergman said he was surprised to hear his letter had gotten so much attention, but he stands by his argument.

“Like a worm in an apple, the Internet eats us from within and takes over,” he said.

Good point. The Internet eats us from within. So did TV, but now that TV is gone, if we return the Internet to the military, we should also return books to the Church. But wait… Isn’t it ideas that are the real problem?

Ideas eat us from within. Then again, some ideas feed us and make us live, laugh and love. Ah. So all it depends on which ideas we allow to grow. And if we admit that that responsibility is ours for ideas, we go back and see that we don’t need to return the Internet after all, now do we?